Great Balls of Evolution
Category: bacteria
cooperation + metabolism + hydrogen + electricity + evolution = AWESOME
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 10:22 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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Notes, thoughts, and news on synthetic biology by Christina Agapakis.
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bacteria:
Designer Bacteria
Category: design
Synthetic biologists work on designing living cells, but engineered bacteria don't usually come up when you think of "designer" things. This year however, a synthetic biology design is up for a Brit Insurance Design of the Year award, up against...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 8:42 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Microbial Landscapes
Category: art
The Harvard Microbial Sciences Initiative Graduate Consortium hosted a fun workshop during the January term where students learned about microscopy by taking some amazing pictures of food microbes. The images taken with the scanning electron microscope of sauerkraut, kombucha, and...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 4:16 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Experimental Livestream
Category: bacteria
My friend Patrick is embarking on a 48 experiment, studying circadian rhythm and destroying his own in the process. He's also embarking on a social media experiment, live-streaming the whole thing on ustream. Tune in to watch real science in...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 8:40 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Dispatches from the Future
Category: iGEM
It's been a few weeks since the iGEM jamboree, a whirlwind, completely exhausting weekend of student synthetic biology projects. This tweet from Robin Sloan from the #igem2010 stream is a pretty good way to sum up the weekend: .bbpBox987719207489536...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 3:32 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Bacterial Lightbulb
Category: bacteria
This year's Cambridge iGEM team has made a tiny, wireless lightbulb filled with bioluminescent bacteria! There are two main ways of engineering luminescence in E. coli (I assume these are E. coli, correct me if I'm wrong!). One is to...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 8:19 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Emergent Cooperation
Category: cooperation
My good friend and labmate just published an awesome paper: "Emergent cooperation in microbial metabolism." His experiment started with 46 strains of E. coli that had mutations in their metabolic pathways that prevented them from being able to grow without...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 9:49 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Wireless Cellular Communication
Category: bacteria
Cells are constantly jibber jabbering, sending messages to each other to coordinate behavior, both within a population of single-celled organisms or between cells of an individual multicellular organism. Most of these signals are chemicals that float around in the liquid...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 11:40 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Terraforming
Category: astrobiology
Life transforms environments, creating ecosystems where there was once only rocks. The evolution of photosynthetic bacteria billions of years ago created the atmosphere we have today, paving the way for the evolution of larger, oxygen-breathing organisms. We humans obviously...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 11:49 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Bacterial Builders
Category: bacteria
Check out this awesome video of a computer-controlled swarm of magnetic bacteria building a pyramid out of tiny bricks!!! From IEEE Spectrum, via It Takes 30, the always fascinating blog from Harvard Systems Biology, the department my lab is in!...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 9:05 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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